Drop City

something unexpected, out of place, one of those aberrations of nature that made life so damned interesting out here in the wastelands, because just when you thought you'd seen it all-- “Who is that out there wading in the creek?” Pamela said, and her eyes were keener than his, how about that? And then it--they--came into focus for him. He saw the two figures grow together and then separate like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, the canoe slicing closer now, the two of them bending to the water and coming back up again, standard-issue hip waders, glossy shirts, the flash of light from the linked silver band that looped the crown of a flat-brimmed hat. He was dumbfounded, absolutely dumbfounded. There were two black men--two Negroes, _hippie__ Negroes--out in the sun-spangled wash of Last Chance Creek, panning for gold.
    “Hello,” he called as the canoe drifted up on them, “how you doing?”
    Neither man said a word. They gave him looks, though, fixed dark eyes bristling with distrust and hostility. The current surged at their thighs, at the sagging skin of their waders. They regarded the canoe for a long solemn moment, as if it had appeared there spontaneously as some sort of compound of the water and air, and they looked first to Pamela, and then Sess, before turning back to their work, rinsing scoop after scoop of sand in the dull gleam of their pans till all the false clinging grains of silica were washed free.
    “Showing any color?” Sess asked, because he had to say something.
    The smaller one looked up out of a face like a tobacco pouch worn smooth with secret indulgence. His voice was soft, a whisper. “Naw, ain't nothin' here, isn't that right, Franklin?”
    The other one glanced up now, one wild eye and a look that invited nothing. “Naw,” he seconded, “nothin'.”
    Then the first one: “Place isn't worth shit. Right, Franklin?”
    “Right.”
    Sess said he guessed he'd be seeing them later, then, and Pamela said good luck, and they both dug at their paddles, eager to work their way out of earshot and run this episode through the grinder. They'd gone three or four hundred yards, when Pamela lifted her paddle on the glide and turned her head to him. “What was that all about?”
    “Beats me,” he said. “But they wouldn't find half an ounce of gold in that creek if they panned it for a hundred years.”
    “They sure don't act that way. They act like those wild hairs in _The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,__ like Humphrey Bogart and I don't who--”
    “Walter Huston,” he said.
    “Right, Walter Huston.”
    The canoe drifted. The sun cut diamonds out of the water. “They were black men, Pamela. Negroes. Where in god's name do you find Negroes up here?”
    Boynton had come into view now and she arched her back and dipped her paddle. “Jesus, Sess,” she said, throwing the words over her shoulder, “black men, red men, Chinese, what difference does it make? You sound like you've never seen a black man before.”
    He was going to say, “I haven't,” but just then a new feature, as strange in its way as the two figures in the creek, leapt out of the shoreline at him in an explosion of color. It wasn't a house exactly, more like a Quonset hut, wedged in between Richard Schrader's weathered gray clapboard box and the shack, and the presence of it there stymied him a minute, but then he knew what it was and knew the answer to his question all in a single flash of intuition: Where do you find Negroes up here? In a hippie bus, that's where.
    If he expected warmth and conviviality at the Three Pup, he was mistaken. Lynette was laying for him, and so was Skid Denton. The minute he ushered Pamela in the door, Lynette backed away from the bar and said, “Whoa, here he is, the hippie king himself. Or should I say, hippie landlord?”
    Skid Denton was welded to his seat at the end of the bar, as usual, a plate of home fries at his elbow and a glass of beer sizzling in his hand. He leaned forward from the waist to put in his two cents: “It's a bonfire every night and that hippie music never stops. I hear they're screwing themselves raw upriver, screwing everything but the dog, and smoking drugs all day long. They really get a cabin built?”
    “That one with the bones in his hair,” Lynette said.
    “And the niggers.” Richie Oliver looked up red-eyed from his scotch and water as if he'd been dog-paddling in a sea of it for the past three days. “Don't forget the niggers.”
    Eight people